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Videogame developers at Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM have founded what they’re calling “the first recognised workplace union in the UK games industry”, operating as part of the Independent Works Union of Great Britain. It’s yet another twist in the tale of a once-feted development studio who are now heavily associated with toxic layoffs, alleged fraud and diasporic feuding.
It must have been a stressful few days for Microsoft. Game Pass changes nobody likes, admitting the first Xbox-branded handheld costs a thousand bucks, having to tell the Israeli military that they need to see other people. Yeesh. No wonder they’re so intent on blowing off steam by taking a scythe to Windows 10 security updates this month, a move that will effectively end official support for the operating system.
Starbreeze have cancelled Project Baxter, the co-op live service Dungeons & Dragons game they announced back in 2023. Part of the development team have been transferred to other projects with Starbreeze, while the remainder get to “transition to new roles across the industry”.
Fortnite developers Epic Games have confirmed they’ll be redeploying the ‘Peaceful Hips’ emote added to the battle royale as part of a crossover with superhero show Peacemaker, but with some modifications. This follows the dance being pulled from the game earlier this week, due to Epic’s concerns about “creative intentions” in the aftermath of a big plot twist in the TV show.
Customisable player houses are finally set to arrive in World of Warcraft via early access this December, though that early access will be limited to folks who’ve pre-purchased the MMO’s upcoming Midnight expansion. There can never not be a bit of a catch with moving into new digs it seems, even if you’re a virtual orc.
The forthcoming addition of home ownership to WOW was first announced by Blizzard all the way back in November last year at a Warcraft 30th anniversary direct, with the studio finally acting on player cries to inject their adventures with a bit more rearranging of clutter around a place in which you sleep. Let us be paralysed by the mundane terror of picking the right interior decor, they screamed. K, said Blizzard.
I have been sort of enjoying former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah’s reinvention as a Youtuber who trades insider BioWare anecdotes for merch. He’s got an actual T-shirt line, including a T-shirt for babies upon which Mark threatens to “pump NFTs” unless you buy his gear. Respectable Crazy Uncle energy. Maybe don’t invite him to your kid’s baptism. But maybe do watch his new video about what might happen to EA’s many development studios in the wake of the company’s $55 billion acquisition by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the gilded suits of Silver Lake.
The tl;dr/tl;dw is that Darrah thinks EA’s various sport game teams, like Madden and EA Sports FC, are probably fine under the new privately-owned EA. Those games bring home a lot of bacon, after all, and EA’s new dads in Riyadh are keen on sports in general. He’s less confident about the studios clustered under EA Entertainment, and especially those such as Darrah’s old joint BioWare who might have more pronounced cultural objections to the new ownership, based on the kinds of stories they tell.
Am I good at chess? I’ll take no for $1500, Alex. But do I love a funky twist on games that are older than time itself? You bet your bottom dollar I do! Enter Below the Crown, a chess video game that is also a roguelike, ,and is also a turn-based strategy game, and is also a dungeon crawler on top of that. It’s a lot! It also works very well, and in a demo that just came out today (alongside an early access release date), there’s a suggestion of something a touch more… unsettling… going on under the hood.
Ananta, whether it ends up being a good game or not, is clearly a confident one. You have to be brave to so blatantly, we’ll say, borrow from so many different games. Like many anime-esque games of its ilk, it will live and die by its characters (which, by the way, you won’t have to gacha roll for), of which it seems to have in spades judging from that first gameplay trailer. These characters will all play differently too, and according to Ananta’s producer Ash Qi, the dev team wants you to think of them like Avengers members. Comparing your new thing to an older, widely loved thing is always a safe move!
There just doesn’t seem to be a good time to release a game right now, does there? We all saw the way that Hollow Knight: Silksong scared away plenty of games, even games with completely different genres. And sometimes it’s just a case of a particular month being stacked – just this month alone there’s Ghost of Yotei, Battlefield 6, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Ninja Gaiden 4, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, the list truly goes on. So, I really can’t blame developer Digital Sun, who’ve announced that Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault has been delayed.
When you review a game, if you don’t know anyone else that’s also reviewing it, it can be a bit difficult to guess how it might be received overall. There’s normally some assumptions you can make, but with a series like Silent Hill, a series where the general consensus is all over the place from game to game, it’s certainly not easy to predict. I myself ended up being quite fascinated by Silent Hill f in my review of it, but in a recent interview series producer Motoi Okamoto said that despite an overall positive reception, you shouldn’t expect every consequent game to be just like it.
